Edith Zink defends her PhD thesis at the Department of Economics
Candidate:
Edith Zink, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
Title:
Empirical Essays on the Political Economy of Social Exclusion
Supervisor:
Associate Professor Pablo Antonio Selaya Elio
Assessment Committee:
Søren Leth-Petersen, Professor of Economics, University of Copenhagen
Johanna Rickne, Professor of Economics, Stockholm University
James A. Robinson, University Professor, University of Chicago
Summary:
This thesis is comprised of three independent chapters with case studies of different forms of social exclusion from a political economy perspective.
Chapter 1 -- What is the Ideal Number of Women in Politics? Distributive Preferences, Inequality, and Meritocracy -- with Pablo Selaya and Sina Smid
In this project, we propose to view the low number of women in politics as a question of distributive justice, and study empirically what would constitute an ideal number. We designed an online survey questionnaire in which we ask respondents to (a) estimate the current number of women in politics; and (b) express their preferences for an ideal number of women in politics subject to a “lottery of nature”. The “lottery of nature” helps respondents to abstract from their personal characteristics and social position. Respondents reveal a noticeable degree of preference for inequality in the distribution of political power between men and women. We probe two mechanisms to explain this finding. First, we show that specialization of female politicians in specific policy areas is not the reason. Second, our survey experiments indicate that especially female respondents believe that having more meritocratic attributes is differentially more important for female than for male political candidates. Our research contributes to understanding the mechanisms that sustain a lower participation of women in politics.
Chapter 2 -- After Autocracy: Power Struggles in Tunisia After the Arab Uprisings
In this chapter, I examine the territorial redistribution of political power in Tunisia after the Arab Uprisings; a series of mass protests that led to the ousting of the autocratic president, Ben Ali, who had ruled for 24 years until January 2011. The autocratic regime had concentrated power significantly, resulting in social exclusion and widespread frustration that ultimately galvanized the Uprisings. With Ben Ali's departure, Tunisia embarked on a transition away from the concentrated power and exclusion inherent in autocracy. Political decentralization was an important part of Tunisia's new constitution. Municipal elections, however, were not held until May 2018. In these first seven years after Tunisia's transition from autocracy, the central government appointed, and replaced municipal councils by decree. I generate a novel data set on these council appointments from regulative texts and exploit variation across regions and over time to estimate the effect that council appointments had on social conflict behavior (for example demonstrations, riots, or protests). I find that council appointments led to more violent conflict which is driven by repeated replacements of previously appointed councils. I conclude that my results suggest that there was regional variation in the two suggested motivations behind council appointments: trying to gain control against citizens’ will, and exerting control where there was less resistance.
Chapter 3 -- The Making of a Ghetto: Residential Moving and Neighborhood Segregation -- with Jack Melbourne
Neighborhood segregation is an important source and manifestation of social exclusion. Neighborhood compositions are relevant for social interactions and the availability of local public goods, leading to a form of social exclusion in which residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods do not have access to the same resources as residents of more advantaged neighborhoods. Neighborhood segregation is significantly shaped by peoples' ability and decisions to move into and out of different neighborhoods. In this chapter, we evaluate Denmark's Ghetto Plan, a policy introduced in 2010 with the goal to reduce segregation. We study how this policy affected residential moving decisions. Overall, we find that the policy was largely ineffective, as it did not fundamentally alter neighborhoods socio-economic composition. When we break these effects down into groups of people who moved or stayed in treated neighborhoods, we find that effects are explained by relative changes in the composition of groups of people who chose to move out of and into treated neighborhoods. We discuss that this could be explained by (i) the stigmatization of treated neighborhoods, (ii) avoidance of specific policy measures applied in treated neighborhoods, and (iii) the other incentives to move out that were offered in treated neighborhoods.
An electronic copy of the thesis can be requested here: lema@econ.ku.dk